I was certainly proud of her （and will always be）。 My mom is a legend in my family. Hers is a classic American dream story. At the end of the Vietnam War, she and my four older siblings （ages three through seven）， my grandma, and a handful of other relatives fled to the United States as war refugees. With no money, no connections, broken English, an eighth-grade education, and no help from the men in her life, she was able to work her way into owning not one, not two, not three, but four successful restaurants in Minnesota. She was and is my hero, my idol, and my role model. She made me believe I could do anything if I tried hard enough.
But as much as I admire and love her, I didn’t actually know her very well. Not as a person. I didn’t have a deep understanding of what drove her, what her fears and vulnerabilities were. Like most of the people in my life, she always tried to shield me from the bad, leaving me with bright eyes and little concept of how difficult it truly was to make her way in this country. That changed when I wrote this book.
I’m ashamed to say, however, that when I first set out to write The Bride Test, Esme—this character who shares so much in common with my mom—was not the heroine. She was the unwanted third leg of a love triangle, a woman from Vietnam whom Khai’s mom had arranged for him to marry even though his heart was elsewhere. I figured the story would be deliciously angsty and maybe a little amusing. Despite communication issues and culture clash, Khai would feel obligated to help this woman, but in the end, he’d find a way to be with his true love, someone American-born.
A funny thing happened as I tried to write that story. Esme kept outshining the character who was meant to be Khai’s true love. Esme was brave, and she was fighting for a new life for herself and her loved ones in every way she could. She had reasons, she had depth, but she also had a striking vulnerability. All of her “drawbacks” were not due to her character. They were things beyond her control: her origin, her education level, her lack of wealth, the language she spoke—things that shouldn’t matter when determining the value of a person （if that can even be done）。 It was impossible not to love her. After the first chapter, I stopped writing.
I asked myself why I’d automatically decided my heroine had to be “Westernized.” Why couldn’t she have an accent, have less education, and be culturally awkward? The person I respect most in the entire world is just like that. After careful self-analysis, I realized I’d been subconsciously trying to make my work socially acceptable, which was completely unacceptable to me as the daughter of an immigrant. The book had to be reconceptualized. Not only did Esme deserve center stage, but I needed to tell her story. For me. And for my mom.
But when I restarted the drafting process with a fresh concept and new heroine, I ran into more roadblocks, tougher roadblocks. I’m not an immigrant. I have an Ivy League education. I’ve never experienced true poverty. What do I know about this kind of immigrant experience? I began to research in earnest, hoping I could find what I needed in books and video like I always had in the past.
For interested parties, here are some of the resources I read/watched for greater insights into the Vietnamese immigrant experience:
1. The Unwanted by Kien Nguyen
2. Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai
3. It’s a Living: Work and Life in Vietnam Today edited by Gerard Sasges
4. Mai’s America, a documentary by Marlo Poras
These resources, while wonderful, were insufficient for my purposes. What I needed was a window into the heart of a magnificent Vietnamese woman, someone who had left everything behind, started over in a new world, and succeeded despite the challenges. It would also help if this woman knew what it was like to love an autistic man with issues of his own. Like my father. This was when the conversations started between my mom and me.
For the first time, she opened up and gave me both sides of her stories, not just the bright sides. For example, I’d always known she grew up poor, but she’d never gone into detail. Now she told me about the kind of poverty that still gives her goose bumps when she thinks back. I would share these stories, as I think they provide an amazing contrast to the present and illustrate just how far she’s come—they make me prouder of her—but to my mom, these stories are a source of terrible shame, even decades later as a successful businesswoman. She told me about the time an American officer offered to adopt her as a little girl and send her home to the States—surely that had to be better for her than being poor in Vietnam—but when her dad found out, he cried and cried. I’d heard the story about how my family members escaped to the United States and were taken in by a host family in Minnesota, but I never knew that their refugee plane originally landed in Camp Pendleton, California. No one ever told me that they had to leave for a refugee camp in Nebraska because a violent civilian crowd threw things at them and yelled for the “chinks” to “go home.” Through fresh tears, my mom told me about the blatant discrimination and sexism she faced in the workplace, about how she cried during her breaks but vowed to work even harder and prove herself. Because good work, she says, always speaks for itself. And so it did. And so it does.